Research

I started my PhD at the MPI-EVA in April 2011 under the supervision of Dr. Linda Vigilant and Dr. Martha M. Robbins. My study seeks to investigate if immune-related MHC genes contribute to individual fitness in a long-lived species such as the gorilla. Long-term demographic data will enable us to address specific questions regarding the evolutionary forces, e.g. pathogenic pressure, acting on these functional genes.

However, the MHC region is characterized by extreme levels of gene density and polymorphism which make traditional typing methods laborious and costly, especially for large sample sizes. Although next-generation sequencing has proven its applicability with regard to MHC, most studies to date have traditionally focused on the most polymorphic regions, i.e. exon 2 and 3. Therefore, one of my aims is to develop and establish a high-throughput sequencing platform specifically designed to capture targeted regions of the MHC from non-invasively collected samples, i.e. feces, which are typically of low DNA quantity and quality.